Months ago, when the cat was sick with a cold, she got a treat—chunky canned food in thick sauce—instead of her usual weight-control dry food mix. The saucer of wet food sat in a place on the floor where she doesn’t usually get food, a reminder that this was a special event. Tonight she returns to that spot on the floor and sniffs around, meows, looks up at me with her big yellow eyes. She waits, unsure of what for. In these poems by Romanian writer Robert G. Elekes, everyone is waiting for the ghost of some comfort. The dead wait for the living to join them, while the living are “embalmed in now” waiting on a train car. These poems seduce with surreal imagery and dreamlike logic, conflating the worlds of the living and the dead, dreaming and waking, childhood innocence and adult sensibilities.

One poem, “Biofilm,” borrows the repetition and structures of a nursery rhyme or storybook, the rhythms of which are in pleasant and productive contrast to its morbid content. Exploring how the living behave when the dead spring up from the ground like flowers, the imagery is funny, endearing, menacing. The children “step on them / roll around in them, / rip them from their waist up, smell them.” Yes, these poems smell. Like flowers, like death, like feet. They tap into that part of the brain that stores scents as memories, the part that lets us feel nostalgic for things we aren’t positive even happened. They keep me returning like the cat does to that spot on the floor. Looking for some comfort, sniffing around. Waiting, unsure of what will come.
S. Whitney Holmes

Biofilm

it’s spring and everywhere
the dead are sprouting and blossoming.
people are leaving their blocks
walking hand in hand among them,
unwinding in sundipped parks
letting the snow melt
that fell between their ears
while bees are flying from dead to dead,
sucking their nectar
dipping themselves in
scattering them through the world,
from so much death in the air
hypersensitive citizens are
sneezing themselves on the asphalt of the city.

it’s spring and everywhere
the dead are sprouting and blossoming.
running through fields, children
step on them
roll around in them,
rip them from their waist up, smell them,
braid them into a crown
and they gather the pretty ones
to put in a jar at home
and their parents are watching
them with satisfaction while
a lonesome sausage is burning
silently on the grill.

it’s spring and everywhere
the dead sprouting and blossoming.
and somewhere on a street corner, a kid
is selling his tilted-headed dead:
three to five bucks
and somewhere he surprises her,
with a bouquet of dead for her birthday,
and someone somewhere is drinking tea of the dead
and someone somewhere is stealing somebody else’s dead,
and somebody somewhere is putting cream
of the dead on her face to remain
forever young,
and somewhere in a pasture the dead
are entering one side of a cow and escaping the other
and somewhere someone is blowing into the dandelion
dead and making a wish while watching
all their limbs floating around
and someone somewhere is fishing
a limb out of the wind
and sinks it into her cleavage for luck,
and someone somewhere on his knees,
the dead between his teeth,
asks someone to marry him,
and somewhere a girl with the dead in her hair
is satisfied, licking her ice-cream.

it’s spring and in the Bartolomeu cemetery
my father is sprouting and blossoming.
waiting, like every year, for me
to come
into blossom with him.

Panopticon CFR

Patrocle eyes them all
the same
vagabond flesh
embalmed in now
they rock themselves
from one to the other,
in patience, in slumber,
in an instant
fetishized, pushing
lazily with their tongue
that black point of time
from one cavity
to the other and scraping
thought after thought
into the crusty skin of the world.

like a flower, their waiting
grows out of Patrocle’s chest,
he tries to hide it
but banality is a bitch
that likes to take a smell at everything,
take a piss where you are
at your most beautiful.

Endodontia IV (The Dream)

You open the door of the apartment, a heavy smell of feet greets
you and you know that your father is home. You go into
the kitchen where your mother is cutting an onion
so you won’t see she’s crying.
After a few hells and goddamns she breaks
into laughter. That’s what she does. Cursing makes your mother
happy. She comes to you and goes through your hair
with her hand until she gets stuck
in the dirt that nestles there. Then she changes,
her gesture into one far less affectionate and pulls
you by the hair to the bathroom. She knocks
on the door and asks your father if you
can get into the bathtub with him. You
hear something big coming out
of the water and then silence
until the door opens and he looks at you from up there
from his tower of flesh, smiling.
He needed a few seconds to cover his nakedness
with a towel. Now he is ready to take you in.
You get undressed and sink into the water, ashened
by the dirt he brought home from work
and he starts washing you. First the head,
as always, the filthiest part of your body. Then
your back, your arms, your chest. A thick fog
gathers in the bathroom. You breathe it in
and weariness falls on your eyelids. Suddenly
the feeling that the water is cutting you
in half because you can’t see the bottom
part of your body due to the floating dirt.
You are close to falling
asleep; your father notices this and tries
to tickle your sleepiness away. You
tickle back and in the heat of it you
bite him with all your power into his right arm.
Your teeth force themselves into his flesh,
you feel his skin tearing. He doesn’t
show any sign of pain or anger. He smiles.
He pulls your teeth out
of his arm but a milk tooth stays
imbeded into his wound. Your father’s blood
is dripping slowly into the murky water
and the vapours are making you
sleepier and sleepier. You let yourself go
in the bathtub and you watch
how blood, pee and dirt blend
and flow, together with you, down
into the darkness of the plug hole.